Our flight from Cape Town to Hanoi was tedious to say the least; we flew from Cape Town to Johannesburg to Doha to Bangkok to Hanoi in the span of twenty-four hours. Flying from South Africa to Qatar was quite an amazing experience, knowing that I was passing over dozens of countries that I’d love to visit. Our bus ride from the airport to the center of the city showed the progression of agriculture to urban density as rice fields were…
Just as the weather in Morocco was becoming uncomfortably cool, it was time to leave the country and depart for Bolivia, where the weather is warm—and will only get warmer. Transitioning from an Islamic nation to a primarily Catholic one has been one of the most noticeable differences of my study-abroad program thus far. Religion has been a large cultural aspect in all of the nations that we have visited. In Vietnam, my host family brought me to numerous pagodas; in Morocco, calls for…
During my program’s last week in Brazil, we had the week off of classes. It was wonderful to have the executive power to choose where to go; I settled on spending five days on an island named Ilhabela off the eastern coast of the country. I and twelve other students booked rooms at a hostel on the island right on the beach. With the moon still bright in the sky, my friend Alex and I left our house at 4:00 a.m. to catch the 6:00…
After I fell sick in Hanoi for over a week (the entirety of my stay there), I was glad to have a change in scenery once I was finally in recovery. Studying with IHP requires a lot of stamina in order to travel so frequently. For someone like me who has not traveled much, our travel days are exhausting. Our journey from Hanoi, Vietnam to Rabat, Morocco began on a Friday afternoon. We checked out of our hotel at 1:00 p.m. and drove…
So far, the most difficult part of my JYA experience has been just trying to get to Tokyo. Flying from New York to Chicago went without a hitch, but the two planes provided for my connecting flight—the second one after an hours-long delay—were both unusable due to mechanical issues. Luckily, I was able to find and band together with three other students, participating in the same CIEE program as me, who were booted off of the same flight to be placed in the same…